Episode
The Wrong Way to Fight Antisemitism in Britain
- Podcast
- On the Nose
- Published
- May 14, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2929
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/on-the-nose-4035786/episodes/the-wrong-way-to-fight-antisemitism-in-britain/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/on-the-nose-4035786/the-wrong-way-to-fight-antisemitism-in-britain.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
On April 29th in London, an attacker stabbed a Muslim acquaintance before traveling to the largely Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green and stabbing two Jewish men at random. This was only the latest in a string of attacks on Jews, synagogues, or other communal infrastructure in the UK since mid-March; other instances have included arson attacks on three synagogues as well as Hatzola ambulances . The British Jewish community—already on edge since the Yom Kippur attack on a Manchester synagogue that killed two and injured three—is in a state of rising alarm. Predictably, Jewish communal leaders , politicians , and the police have baselessly sought to tie the attacks to the Palestine solidarity movement, justifying crackdowns in civil liberties and proposing increased police budgets . The backdrop to these attacks is a local election cycle in which the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, lost substantial ground to tertiary parties on their wings: Reform on the right, and the Green Party on the left. Though newly elected members of the Reform Party include avowed racists and Holocaust deniers , much of the media attention has been on candidates whom the Green Party has removed from contention because of charges of antisemitism . There is particular focus on the head of the Green Party, 43-year-old Zack Polanski, whose Jewish identity and pro-Palestine stance has shattered some of the received wisdom about who British Jews are, announcing a new era in UK Jewish left politics. To discuss the London attacks and their political fallout, Arielle Angel speaks with Brendan McGeever, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of London, and Em Hilton, co-founder of Na’amod, an organization of British Jews opposing Israeli occupat…